


red rose, blue lily

by nasalesbians



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/F, loosely based on this is how you lose the time war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26573554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nasalesbians/pseuds/nasalesbians
Summary: "Ignoring the clenching of her stomach, Azula maneuvered herself to a part of the ceiling crisscrossed with metal beams thick enough to support her weight and sat in a crook where three of them intersected. This mission had been in the works for months; each of her moves was planned out, and she had memorized everything, down to the shoes the president should be wearing (size ten faux-leather brogues with a subtle but distinctive squeak in the left sole). She bared her teeth in frustration. What use was it all if they weren’t even here?"Or, the convoluted time-traveling spy AU that absolutely nobody asked for.
Relationships: Azula/Ty Lee (Avatar)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33





	red rose, blue lily

**Author's Note:**

> as i mentioned in the tags, this fic is kinda sorta based off of this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone. it's also largely unedited, and most of it was written within 24 hours of posting. enjoy!

Every one of Azula’s senses was on high alert as she clung to the ceiling of the Caldera Metropolitan Aquarium. Below her, the tanks roiled and bubbled as the water recycling system churned in a pathetic imitation of the ocean’s currents. It was noisy, filling her ears and threatening to steal her concentration away, but she pushed herself to focus. No other sounds were forthcoming—no footsteps, no voices, none of the usual things that typically indicated a human presence. She glanced at her watch: twelve-thirty, Pacific Standard. Another quick scan of the room; nobody else was there. She was right on time, perfectly in position, but the President of the Coalition of Nations—Azula’s intended target—wasn’t here.

Panic was shoved out of her mind before it even had the chance to take root. That wasn’t an option, now or ever. She was a trained operative, a professional, and she still had a job to finish. 

Ignoring the clenching of her stomach, Azula maneuvered herself to a part of the ceiling crisscrossed with metal beams thick enough to support her weight and sat in a crook where three of them intersected. This mission had been in the works for months; each of her moves was planned out, and she had memorized everything, down to the shoes the president should be wearing (size ten faux-leather brogues with a subtle but distinctive squeak in the left sole). She bared her teeth in frustration. What use was it all if they _weren’t even here?_

With both hands now free, Azula reached into one of her many pockets and retrieved a tiny case. Inside were two contact lenses that gleamed a dull red in the aquarium’s dim lighting. She placed each of them in her eyes, blinking as they slid into place. As soon as they did her vision shifted: the regular color spectrum faded out, replaced with red-yellow-purple shadows and tints. The stone walls and glass tanks around her became all but invisible. Even the cold-blooded fish were no more than ripples against the cool water.

She herself, though, was lit up in red and yellow, blazing like an exothermic beacon.

She began to search the aquarium for other heat signatures, navigating the ceiling like a bat, clinging to beams and skirting around security cameras with ease. This was the fun part: the hunt, with Azula and all her strength and ingenuity pitted against her target, soft and slow in comparison. If the president and their security retinue were hiding somewhere in the building, she would find them.

In the third room a flash of orange, a sign of heat, caught her eye. The instant she zeroed in on its source, a flowery scent reached her nose. She inhaled shallowly, testing, but it didn’t smell like any poison she knew, nor did it make her eyes sting or her throat close up. _Strange._

With a few acrobatic swings Azula was across the room, peering at a vent high on the wall. Deftly she plucked a folded piece of paper, orange in her thermal sight and warm from another person’s touch, out from behind the vent cover. Inside, in a familiar flowing script, it read, _Mx. President is safe with us. Better luck next time, my red, red rose._ There was something else written beneath it, but Azula didn’t allow herself to read it. She folded the note back up and slid it into a pocket, curling her upper lip in an expression of disgust and annoyance.

She had been defeated, outsmarted by the blue faction.

Her superiors in the red faction would be furious, back at Headquarters many centuries in the future, when they realized. It didn’t matter if Azula reported in or not; her success or failure would be evident in the effects rippling up the woven strands of time to where they sat, monitoring the past with hawklike intensity.

Azula knew nothing of the potential repercussions, simply that it would spell disaster for humanity years in the future. Her superiors hadn’t told her anything further because she didn’t need to know—she needed to succeed with her assassination. And now that she hadn’t, Azula knew, she was in deep shit.

* * *

Perched on the concrete roof of a skyscraper, Azula considered the horizon. It was orange and yellow, shot through with blue-pink clouds. Beautiful, but ultimately unhelpful. She glanced down at her fist. At the note clutched tight in her palm.

Slowly she unfolded it, scanned the elegantly written lines inside and held them fast to her memory. When she was finished, she incinerated the paper with a burst of flame summoned from her hand. The smoke smelled faintly of flowers.

Not only was the taunt over her defeat from the blue faction, it was from a certain operative of theirs whom Azula had encountered many times before—whatever “before” meant when they both had existed at so many different points in time. Each time Azula had met her was brief, never more than a few seconds, a glimpse, or even just a foiled plan, like this last time.

Azula couldn’t remember when the letters had started, only that the blue operative had begun it. On each mission Azula undertook, she found a note waiting there for her, written elegantly and smelling faintly of flowers. Reading them made her stomach flip and her heart race, although she wasn’t in any danger. The operative called her _Red_ , for her allegiance, and, she once admitted, for the rose, a flower she thought would suit Azula very nicely. Upon reading this Azula had rolled her eyes in disdain for the blue faction and their obsession with plants, but found that she did not mind the nickname, or the occasional _Red Rose_ , or even _Big Red_.

For her part, the blue operative didn’t reveal her name either, and Azula had taken to calling her _Blue Lily_ both in letters and in her own head. Thinking of Blue Lily felt dangerous, even here, where Headquarters could not see her, even silently, with no witnesses to her transgressions but herself.

But still she thought, and stared at the sunset, and considered her next move.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my (unfortunately unedited) submission for the first day of tyzula week 2020! i actually have a much longer fic planned (that will actually make everything make sense) for this au but i was just too excited to write something for it so here we are :)
> 
> big huge shoutout to the organizers of tyzula week on twitter! y'all are doing amazing, and i thank you for giving me the opportunity to write some bullshit and share it with the world
> 
> thanks so much for reading! <3


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